Rehearsing Words and Gestures in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

Abstract

Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde offers many rhetorical lessons and models in how to speak and behave well according to the mediaeval conventions of fin'amor. The first three books of the poem are especially concerned with the best ways to control and express deep feeling. The two lovers prepare nervously for their first meeting at the beginning of Book III. Troilus, in particular, rehearses and seeks to memorise the best words, gestures, and facial expressions to use when he first speaks with Criseyde. In Book V, Diomede enacts very similar practices in his seduction of Criseyde, but the reader is encouraged to read this as a different kind of deliberate performance. Using the work of Monique Scheer and other theorists of emotional practice and the history of emotions, this essay explores the ambiguity of performance as both a rehearsed theatrical mode; and as the practice and affirmation of conventional forms of emotional expression. It concludes by proposing that Thomas Hoccleve's ‘mirror scene’ in his Compleinte draws on Troilus's rehearsals, adopting the performance anxiety associated with romantic love for his own more social and public concerns.